Antawn Jamison Rumors | Hoops Rumors

Wizards Notes: Beal, Bertans, McRae, Jamison

September 2nd, 2019 at 10:46am CST by Arthur Hill

Bradley Beal still has a shot at a super-max contract, but the Wizards‘ lack of success on the court may stand in his way, writes Chase Hughes of NBC Sports Washington. Beal can make himself eligible for the deal, which would pay about $254MM over five years, by making an All-NBA team. He fell just short last season despite averaging 25.6 PPG, and Washington’s 32-50 record may have hurt his cause.

The Wizards will likely be even worse this year after launching a youth movement. Tomas Satoransky, Trevor Ariza, Jeff Green, Bobby Portis and Jabari Parker are all gone from last season’s team, and more minutes will go to Troy Brown Jr. and rookie Rui Hachimura. Hughes notes that Westgate Sportsbook has set Washington’s over-under on wins at 28.5. It has been 15 years since a player has made an All-NBA team while winning fewer than 29 games.

There’s more news from Washington:

Davis Bertans, who was acquired in a trade with the Spurs, will probably start at power forward until Hachimura proves he’s ready, predicts Fred Katz of The Athletic. Hachimura could still win the job with an outstanding performance in camp, but Katz sees Bertans as the safer choice. He doesn’t believe they’ll be in the starting lineup together, even if C.J. Miles isn’t able to play at the start of the season.
Jordan McRae received additional guaranteed money by staying on the roster through 5:00pm Eastern time yesterday, tweets Bobby Marks of ESPN. McRae’s guarantee on his $1,645,357 contract doubled from $200K to $400K. He will get another $200K if he makes the opening-night roster. McRae appeared in 27 games as a two-way player last season and will be fighting for a roster spot in training camp, as the Wizards have just 13 fully guaranteed contracts.
Antawn Jamison tells Candace Buckner of The Washington Post he’s enjoying his new role as director of pro personnel. Jamison decided to leave television behind when new GM Tommy Sheppard offered him the job. “This is … my calling as far as after basketball and being in the front office and being a piece of the puzzle in trying to put the right pieces together,” Jamison said. “This is going to be fun. I love being able to come back to D.C. and being around people I respect and people who respect me. Out of all the things that have happened after basketball, this might be the smoothest transition.”

Wizards Hire Antawn Jamison In Front Office Role

August 14th, 2019 at 8:49am CST by Luke Adams

The Wizards have brought a familiar face back to the organization, announcing today in a press release that Antawn Jamison has been hired as the club’s director of pro personnel.

Jamison, the fourth overall pick in the 1998 draft, spent nearly six of his 16 NBA seasons with the Wizards. He played for the franchise from 2004-10, earning both of his All-Star nods during his time in Washington. Now, after spending the last two years as a scout for the Lakers, he returns to D.C. in a role that will see him contributing to the Wizards’ NBA, G League, and international scouting efforts.

“We are absolutely thrilled to bring Antawn back to the Wizards organization,” Wizards GM Tommy Sheppard said in a statement. “In addition to his strong feel for the game and basketball knowledge, he has always been a true professional and a dedicated worker. We look forward to him bringing those qualities to our front office.”

The Wizards also announced the hirings of Laron Profit and John Cariedo, both of whom will join the team as scouts. Like Jamison, Profit also spent time in Washington as a player — the two men were teammates during the 2004/05 season.

Lakers Notes: Free Agents, LeBron, Jamison

March 17th, 2019 at 10:18am CST by Arthur Hill

The Lakers‘ path to a sixth straight non-playoff season began with a string of questionable free agent signings after they landed LeBron James, writes Marc Stein of the New York Times. In a look at what went wrong in L.A. this season, Stein notes that team president Magic Johnson and GM Rob Pelinka surrounded James with JaVale McGee, Rajon Rondo, Lance Stephenson, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Michael Beasley, a shaky group of shooters who all have checkered pasts.

The Lakers had planned to give LeBron a season to mesh with the team’s collection of young talent before making a bid for Anthony Davis, Stein adds, but that changed when Davis submitted a trade request to the Pelicans in late January. The fallout from repeated leaked offers affected the players who were reportedly involved — Brandon Ingram, Lonzo Ball, Kyle Kuzma and Josh Hart — and fractured the locker room, as the players know negotiations will resume in the offseason.

Lakers management will face intense pressure to shake up the organization this summer and produce a winner, Stein notes. Head coach Luke Walton will almost certainly be replaced and a roster overhaul appears imminent. Cap room is available to make another free agent splash, but the front office will have to be much smarter about how it spends its money.

There’s more Lakers news this morning:

James remains confident that his team will move in the right direction this summer, relays Kyle Goon of The Orange County Register. After Thursday’s loss in Toronto, James was asked about the organization’s ability to appeal to the upcoming free agent class, which includes the Raptors’ Kawhi Leonard. “I think everybody knew that coming into this year it was still going to be challenging even if we were all healthy and played all 82 games,” James responded. “… We have an opportunity to get better this summer through free agency, and through the draft, and I believe our front office and our coaching staff are going to make that happen.”
Everyone who suggested the Lakers should shut down LeBron for the rest of the season is missing the big picture, contends Michael Lee of The Athletic. James has little chance of winning three more championships to match Michael Jordan’s six, but he can still pass Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the league’s career scoring leader. He’s nearly 6,000 points behind and needs to play as much as possible to have a chance.
Antawn Jamison, now working as a scout with the Lakers, talks about his aspirations to become a GM someday in an interview with Alex Kennedy of HoopsHype.

Lakers To Add Antawn Jamison For Scouting Role

October 3rd, 2017 at 4:21pm CST by ChrisCrouse

The Lakers will hire Antawn Jamison in a scouting role, Shams Charania of The Vertical reports. Charania adds that he will work under president of basketball operations Magic Johnson, GM Rob Pelinka, and assistant GM Jesse Buss.

Jamison played for the Lakers back in the 2012/13 season and he has worked for the organization as a TV analyst since retiring from the league in 2014.

The former no. 4 overall pick spent 16 seasons as a pro where he averaged 18.5 points and 7.5 rebounds per contest. In addition to playing for the Lakers, he also spent time with the Warriors, Mavericks, Wizards, Cavs, and Clippers.

Free Agent Stock Watch: Antawn Jamison

August 29th, 2014 at 3:29pm CST by Chuck Myron

Two years ago, Hoops Rumors readers overwhelmingly voted for Antawn Jamison as the best minimum-salary signee in the league soon after his decision to sign with the Lakers for what looked like a steep discount. A year and a half later, Jamison’s stock had plummeted, and he’s been out of the NBA since the Hawks waived him shortly after acquiring him from the Clippers at the trade deadline this past February. No one is immune to the ravages of age, but it’s tough to imagine that Jamison’s skills have eroded so quickly after he scored 17.2 points per game for the Cavs in 2011/12 that he’s become unworthy of a place on an NBA roster.

The 37-year-old Jamison told DeAntae Prince of The Sporting News recently that he has options in free agency, as we passed along, but the one-time No. 4 overall pick didn’t specify whether any of those options included offers from NBA teams. The Wasserman Media Group client has signed with teams that figured to contend for titles the past two seasons. Should the right NBA opportunity materialize for him this year, it wouldn’t necessarily matter if it involved going to a team without a reasonable chance of winning the title, as Jamison also told Prince.

Jamison was reportedly among the players the Knicks were considering in February, shortly after his release from the Hawks, but that was before Phil Jackson took over the team’s front office. The Wizards were eyeing him around that same time, and Washington GM Ernie Grunfeld was in place there for the entirety of Jamison’s five and a half seasons in the nation’s capital. Still, one report suggested Washington’s interest in a reunion was only “lukewarm.” The Hawks and Jamison appeared to share interest in parting ways with each other last season, so it doesn’t seem like he’ll be returning to Atlanta anytime soon, even if he’s more willing to consider teams outside the title picture. Reports have linked the former University of North Carolina star to the Hornets (then Bobcats) in previous offseasons. Charlotte has 14 guaranteed deals, as our roster counts show, and while the team appears to be reluctant to use the final spot on a center, that probably doesn’t apply to a stretch four like Jamison. Still, there’s been no chatter connecting Jamison to the Hornets this summer.

The Spurs were apparently another team interested in Jamison this past February, and they wouldn’t force him to give up his title dreams. However, San Antonio is carrying 14 fully guaranteed pacts and three partially guaranteed deals, and the team still has a qualifying offer out to restricted free agent Aron Baynes, so it doesn’t appear there’s room for Jamison there. The Bulls were also linked to Jamison in that same report, and while the team only has 12 players, Taj Gibson, Pau Gasol, Nikola Mirotic and second-round pick Cameron Bairstow crowd the power forward position, so Jamison wouldn’t be a logical fit in Chicago, either.

Jamison took 17.5 shots per game in 2011/12 with the Cavs, matching a career high. His PER that season was 16.1, which set a career low at the time. That suggests that his high scoring average was at least in part the product of a stripped-down roster that gave then-coach Byron Scott few other choices for creating offense. Jamison’s efficiency has continued to decline over the past two seasons, coming in at a still-respectable 15.3 in his lone season with the Lakers before bottoming out at 7.8 in the small sample size of his 248 total minutes with the Clippers. There’s no doubt that Jamison is fading, but it’s debatable whether he’s any worse at this point than most of the players taking up space at the back end of NBA rosters.

He’s not going to win another Sixth Man of the Year award, as he did back in 2003/04, but the 6’8″ Jamison is not far removed from having nailed 36.1% of his three-point attempts with the Lakers in 2012/13, the third highest percentage he’s ever recorded. He’s been consistent from behind the arc, making 34.6% of his treys during his career, save for last season’s 8 for 41 performance in his brief stint as a Clipper. Last year might have soured the league’s front offices on Jamison, but in an NBA increasingly obsessed with analytics, I’m not sure his time with the Clippers provided an acceptable amount of evidence.

There’d be little call for Jamison to reprise the high-volume shooting role he played for the Cavs a few years ago, so even as he opens himself to signing with a non-contender, it seems Jamison is best suited to help teams that want to win now. There are plenty of teams with which he wouldn’t make sense, but it only takes one club that believes in him for the two-time All-Star to wear an NBA jersey again. Jamison said in Prince’s report that while he’s not ruling out retirement, he won’t know what he’s going to do next for at least another month, perhaps suggesting that he envisions signing with a team at midseason rather than going to training camp. Waiting a full year to return to the league would be risky, but when teams are allowed to issue 10-day contracts again in January, such a deal would allow Jamison to make at least small slice of guaranteed money while keeping a team’s initial investment minimal. There’s a strong chance that we’ve seen the last of Jamison in sneakers, but don’t bet on it.

And-Ones: Griffin, Calipari, Mozgov, Jamison

August 28th, 2014 at 4:29pm CST by Chuck Myron

The Cavs were in talks with John Calipari about a coach/executive role that would give him authority over the front office even after they removed the interim tag from GM David Griffin‘s title, but Griffin doesn’t sound upset about the team’s attempted maneuver. Griffin made his comments Wednesday in a radio appearance on The Doug Gottlieb Show, and James Herbert of CBSSports.com provides a partial transcription.

“To be honest with you, I don’t think anything was ever done without my knowledge of what was being done, for one,” Griffin said. “And two, I turned down opportunities to be a GM because the fit wasn’t right, and when I sat with [owner] Dan [Gilbert] and [Cavs vice chairman] Nate [Forbes], when we talked about our vision for the future and me having this job, I encouraged them to talk to other people. It was something that was really important to me.”

Gilbert said he would have been “disappointed” if the team hadn’t spoken with Calipari, so it seems he and his bosses are in lockstep as the Cavs prepare to chase a title. There’s more from Cleveland amid the latest from around the league:

Timofey Mozgov is intrigued by the idea of again playing for David Blatt, who coached him on the Russian national team, and with LeBron James, but he says he’s not going to push for a trade from the Nuggets, as Boris Khodorovsky of ITAR-TASS observes (translation via Alexander Chernykh of Rush’n Hoops). The Cavs have reportedly been trying to trade for Mozgov.
Free agent Antawn Jamison won’t rule out retirement, but the 38-year-old would prefer to find an NBA deal, as he tells DeAntae Prince of The Sporting News. The 16-year vet also said to Prince that while he has “options” in free agency, he won’t decide on any of them for at least another month, and he won’t limit himself to signing with contenders, as he has the past two offseasons.
Some NBA teams had planned on scouting three-year NBA veteran Mickael Gelabale at the World Cup, and he’s also drawing interest from FC Barcelona of Spain, tweets Shams Charania of RealGM.

Free Agent Rumors: LeBron, Deng, Jamison

July 1st, 2014 at 11:55pm CST by Zachary Links

Suns managing partner Robert Sarver expressed confidence in his club’s chances of luring LeBron James to Phoenix, writes Bob Young of the Arizona Republic. “We are in a good position,” he said. “We have a lot to offer, too, with the depth of our roster compared to some of the other teams. We think we have a favorable opportunity, but obviously he’ll make his decision when he wants to make it. He’ll look at the facts and make a decision.”

Luol Deng would welcome the chance to return to the Bulls, agent Ron Shade told Sam Amick of USA Today. “There’s always going to be a part of him that belongs to Chicago, and part of Chicago that belongs to him,” Shade said. “There were no hard feelings (about the trade). Moving forward, he’d look to have an amicable relationship (if he played with the Bulls).“
Free agent forward Antawn Jamison, 38, is in good shape and is not contemplating retirement, a source tells Marc J. Spears of Yahoo Sports (on Twitter).
Kent Bazemore has meetings lined up with the Spurs next Tuesday followed by the Celtics next Wednesday, sources tell Michael Scotto of Sheridan Hoops (on Twitter).
Anthony Morrow, one of the league’s best shooters, has received interest from 12 teams around the league since free agency began, tweets Michael Scotto of Sheridan Hoops.
With Shaun Livingston out of the picture for the Nets, one option for the mini mid-level exception is Bojan Bogdanovic, league sources tell Tim Bontemps of the New York Post (on Twitter).
In addition to the previously reported Hornets and Blazers, Josh McRoberts has drawn interest from the Mavs, Cavs, Heat, Clippers, Knicks, Spurs, Suns and Lakers, a source tells Jeff Goodman of ESPN.com (on Twitter).

Eastern Notes: Sixers, Anthony, Johnson

February 27th, 2014 at 8:29pm CST by Eddie Scarito

The Sixers wound up with only a second-round pick in return for Evan Turner, thanks to their buyout deal with Danny Granger, but a team offered GM Sam Hinkie a first-rounder for Turner at last year’s draft, according to Tom Moore of Calkins Media (Twitter link). With Granger now waived, the team came away with a significantly lower return for Turner at the trade deadline.

Wizards Likely To Sign Drew Gooden

February 25th, 2014 at 8:23am CST by Zachary Links

TUESDAY, 8:23am: J. Michael of CSNWashington adds Antawn Jamison and Justin Hamilton to the list of others the Wizards are considering, but Michael confirms that Gooden is the favorite to land a 10-day deal. The team may also hold off on signing anyone to give Chris Singleton a shot at playing time, Michael writes.

MONDAY, 5:11pm: Gooden will be in D.C. tomorrow to ink his deal with the Wizards, tweets Marc J. Spears of Yahoo Sports. Meanwhile, Michael Lee of the Washington Post (on Twitter) hears that it’s “unlikely” that Washington will sign anyone before tomorrow night’s game against the Magic. He cites Lou Amundson and DeSagana Diop as other 10-day possibilities for the Wizards.

4:11pm: It’s likely that the Wizards will sign Drew Gooden to a 10-day deal, according to Marc Stein of ESPN.com (via Twitter). The 32-year-old hasn’t stepped foot on an NBA court since April of last year but he could help fortify Washington’s frontcourt depth in the wake of Nene‘s injury.

We learned last month that Gooden was working out in hopes of landing an NBA deal. Over his 16 games in Milwaukee last season, the 11-year veteran averaged 13.7 points and 6.5 rebounds in 26.2 minutes per game, which added up to a PER of 18.88. The Bucks wound up using the amnesty clause on the 6’11” big man over the summer, taking his $13.37MM salary between this season and next off of their books.

While other amnesty victims from this past summer like Metta World Peace and Mike Miller were able to hook on elsewhere, there were few, if any, nibbles on Gooden.

Knicks Considering Ike Diogu

February 23rd, 2014 at 9:37pm CST by Zachary Links

The Knicks are mulling whether to use one of two soon-to-be-open roster spots on power forward Ike Diogu, an NBA source tells Marc Berman of the New York Post. The former lottery pick impressed the team during training camp, but was ultimately released.

The Knicks will have two open spots when Metta World Peace and Beno Udrih’s buyouts become official tomorrow. The undersized forward, who is in the D-League with the Bakersfield Jam and averaging 16.2 points and 8.2 rebounds, could be an option for the club. It should come as no surprise that the Knicks would have interest in Danny Granger if he is bought out by the Sixers but they’ve also got interest in Earl Clark, Ben Gordon (if his buyout is completed), and Antawn Jamison.

Because the club is well into luxury tax territory and owner James Dolan is already paying 17 players this season, the Knicks may only sign one player. With solid rebounding ability and a decent mid-range game, New York may make Diogu their pick.